Gods and Monsters
by milliewk
Summary: When Silas Prescott unleashes a threat more sinister than ever before, Jessica must seek out an old enemy to prevent the world's destruction. Endless Summer/Hero crossover. Some liberties taken with Hero MC's backstory and powers.


**Chapter One: A New Era**

Most people, when they think of those in the spotlight - performers, politicians, writers - imagine them to be consistently extraordinary. Always dramatic, always talking shop, always working in some way. People find it difficult to think of them as being or doing anything other than what they're known for.

The same goes for superheroes. Nobody imagines a superhero to ever be anything other than a superhero, but truthfully, when Jessica wasn't out fighting crime, she was passing as anyone else. This is why, although she had been Miss America for many years now, Jessica's day started out just the same as anyone else's.

She awoke groggily to the blaring sound of her alarm at 6 A.M. and spent the next twenty minutes in a mental debate with herself, convincing herself that yes, she really did need this job, and no, it would not be a good idea to call in sick because she was too tired to go. After an insufficient but quick breakfast, she got dressed and was out of the door within half an hour. Sure, she could have been out in less than a minute if she'd done it at superspeed, but just as someone without powers is too tired to run around the house first thing in the morning, Jessica was certainly too tired to run at superspeed.

Sitting at the bus stop, she saw an early riser out for their morning run, and thought about flying to work. She was still too tired.

As usual, the bus was late, so as usual, Jessica was late. She didn't really hear Marjorie giving her an earful about tardiness - it was white noise by now. She made her way up to the top floor of Prescott Industries, using the elevator of course - too tired for stairs. She listened to the elevator music and thought about the fancy coffee machine Grayson kept in his office. She did have some cheap instant coffee in her kitchen, but it was worth the wait for the smooth, creamy coffee that would be waiting for her when she arrived. She smiled, thinking that very few bosses would think to make their assistant's coffee for them in the morning - it was usually the other way around. But then again, Grayson wasn't like most bosses.

After multiple stops as other workers left the elevator for their respective departments, Jessica arrived at the top floor, and with her mind on coffee, the first thing she noticed was the lack of any coffee smell.

The next thing she noticed was the quiet. By now, Grayson was usually mid-phone call, or at least furiously tapping away at his keyboard. Nothing.

"Grayson?" Jessica called out, stepping into the vast office. Although Grayson's work was almost entirely on his computer, his office was easily large enough to fit the entire staff for a small company, complete with break room. The day Grayson's father and boss, Silas Prescott, had given his old office to his son, Jessica had helped set the office up - complete with feigned struggle to lift heavy objects. The whole process had taken a maximum of ten minutes. Grayson's desk faced the window and was decorated with all sorts of trinkets, but aside from a few storage cabinets and a printer, Grayson kept nothing else in his office. When Jessica had commented on the lack of utilisation of the space available, Grayson had allowed her to use the space as she wanted. Hence, the coffee machine. One morning, she had arrived particularly late without having drunk her morning coffee, and apologised to Grayson for her grogginess as she attempted to work without her caffeine fix. The next morning, a state-of-the-art coffee machine had been installed, complete with a cabinet full of mugs, refills, and sugar, and a fridge full of milk. Grayson didn't even drink coffee.

The already empty office was even emptier this morning. All the usual furniture was still there, but without Grayson, the place seemed even quieter. Jessica made her way over to Grayson's desk and noticed that his chair was facing away at an angle, as if he had stood up and moved to leave without taking a moment to tuck the chair back in. A small detail, but Jessica knew Grayson. He wouldn't have left his chair like that unless he was in a hurry. But she had left at the same time as him last night and he had left in no rush.

Jessica looked up out of the window at the view of the city. She didn't see anything out of the ordinary, anything that would have caused Grayson to hurry out of the building. She sat down at his desk and moved the computer mouse to wake it up, and found that it was locked.

She hesitated. Should she go into Grayson's computer? Did she really have reason to believe she needed to access his computer, or would it be a breach of privacy? Logically, there wasn't enough evidence to suggest anything was up. Grayson may have just gone to the bathroom. But Jessica's gut, the one trained by years of fighting crime to sense danger, was telling her something was wrong. She'd never gone into his computer before, but she knew it was the only way for her to find a clue to what was wrong.

Jessica glanced around. Nobody there, obviously. The light above the elevator indicated that it was ten floors down, and on its way further down. Even if someone tried to get in now to go up to the top floor, it would take them 4 minutes and 38 seconds with no stops in between. At this time of the morning, when staff members were still arriving, there would be a minimum of 7 stops on the way back up, adding at least 2 minutes and 24 seconds. This gave Jessica a window of at least 7 minutes and 2 seconds before someone might walk in - the chances of which were very low, as the only person in the building who would come up was Marjorie.

It took Jessica less than a second to calculate this. It wouldn't take her much longer to look inside the computer. Safe in the knowledge she wouldn't be caught, Jessica reached her hand out to the computer, opening her mind up to the signals she could feel coming from the machine, willing her arm to be a channel between her brain and the computer. As her hand met the exterior of the computer, a tingling sensation akin to a static shock ran up her arm, through her shoulder and neck, and up into her brain.

The inside of a computer is impossible to describe. Over the years, Jessica had programmed her mind to perceive it as something tangible, something that would make sense to the human eye. Initially, the amount of information had been overwhelming, but by programming herself to perceive the computer as a house, the human part of her brain was able to work in tandem with the computer part, rather than letting it take over.

So it came to be that Jessica perceived herself to be in a white void, standing in front of a house. Opening the front door, she found herself confronted with Grayson's most recent activity - the programs he had left open on the computer. There was a mostly empty word document, a game of Minesweeper, and his e-mails. She recognised the document and the game as Grayson had had those open when the two of them had left the previous night. His e-mails, however, had not been open.

Feeling a deep pang of guilt over the invasion of Grayson's privacy, Jessica pushed open the door to his e-mails. She focused on looking at the subject lines, not the message text, of the most recent e-mails - if she was going to look at them, she was only going to look at what she needed to look at, and nothing more.

As it turned out, she didn't need to look far. She immediately recognised what she was looking for. The most recently read e-mail, sent at 7:22 A.M., from Silas Prescott: **It's Happening**.

The message text was short, but it filled Jessica's heart with dread.

 _Son. Today, all I have worked for comes to fruition. My greatest accomplishment._

 _You may not agree with me, but you will see. In time._

Jessica drew back, out of the room, out of the house, and out of the void. The tingling in her arm reversed the way it had came, and she opened her eyes, still sitting at the desk in Grayson's office, only a few seconds after having made the connection to his computer.

She looked up out of the window again, and a few blocks away, she saw the rooftop of the Prescott Industries warehouse, where Silas Prescott had been working from ever since he had given this office to Grayson. Although she was on the top floor of the tallest tower in the city, Jessica couldn't see much of the warehouse. She had figured a long time ago that Silas had intentionally designed it this way, so Grayson couldn't see anything suspicious. However, despite their years of warring, Silas still didn't know that Miss America doubled as his son's assistant. He didn't account, when designing the warehouse to be hidden from Grayson's full view, for an assistant who could fly.

Jessica hurried up the final flight of the building's stairs, and when she emerged on the rooftop, she emerged in a sky blue, aerodynamic supersuit, designed for stealth during daytime flight. She hovered several feet above the rooftop, at the exact spot she had figured out a long time ago to be the most strategic position from which to watch the warehouse.

For a few moments, there was little to observe. Jessica considered flying down to the warehouse to take a closer look, a riskier move but perhaps more fruitful. Just as she was about to fly closer, she saw something she had never seen from the warehouse: the roof began to slide open.

When Silas had first built the warehouse, Jessica had taken reconnaissance on the building, and identified the sliding roof, however it had never actually opened before. She hovered, watching, ready to react. Once the heavy roof was fully open, a dark shape began to rise. It was almost a perfect fit for the building, as if the warehouse had been built around the shape. It rose higher and higher. What Jessica could see of the building must have been only the tip of the iceberg, with the warehouse extending deep below the surface, as the rising shape must have been many times larger than the warehouse. Jessica could have calculated its exact height in relation to the height of the warehouse, but she was too agog at the sight of the object, now casting a shadow over several city blocks.

Finally, it emerged in its entirety. The jet-black rectangle hovered above the city. Jessica stared at it, and felt as if the shape were staring back at her. After a few moments, Silas Prescott's face appeared on every side of the shape, staring down at the city.

" _The time of reckoning is nigh_ ," Silas' voice boomed from the shape, loud enough to be audible across the entire city. " _This planet is infested, and it must be cleansed. Witness the end of the stain of humanity. A new era is begun!_ "

BOOM! Silas' face became littered with pinpricks of red light, as red-hot lasers beamed out of the shape in every direction, and in an instant, the city was afire. In every direction, buildings, roads, and parks burned. Unable to avoid the blasts, Jessica was hit squarely in the stomach by the hottest heat she had ever felt, and suddenly she was propelled backwards. Her invulnerable skin did not burn, but Jessica could still feel the fire on every inch of her body as her suit burned away and the force of the beam sent her flying out of control, pushing her further and further away from her city. When the laser died out she could not tell, as she screamed in pain, unable to control her body as she spun, spun, spun through the air, the streaking red light of the burning city ever shrinking.

She was still mid-air when she passed out from the pain.


End file.
